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Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Faith Stories. I'm happy to see you here today.

Just a quick announcement as we get going, and then I will introduce our speaker. So we have one more week of class after this. So just wanted to make sure that you guys know that we do have class next week.

I heard there was maybe a misprint on the website or something. But anyway, just make sure we do have class next week. So I hope to see you here.

Other than that, that's really my only announcement. So I'm going to go ahead and introduce our speaker for this morning. And we'll pray and get started.

So this morning, we'll hear from James Miles. He has attended Faith Church for about 20 years. And he and his wife, Tina, have been married for 25 years.

They've raised four sons. And James works as a business intelligence analyst at the IU School of Medicine. Here at Faith, he volunteers on the security team and in the nursery.

And a fun fact about James, he has walked through the International Space Station, which I can, I think that sounds really cool. So let me pray for us, and we will get started. Heavenly Father, thank you for bringing us here this morning.

Just thank you for your love, and your grace, and the many ways that you have been involved in James' life and in all of our lives, Lord. And I pray that we would recognize that, be with James as he speaks, and be with us as we listen. Just give us open hearts, open minds to hear what you would have for us to learn today, Lord.

And I just pray you would just be with us this morning. Pray this in your name. Amen.

Amen. The last time I was up here, I was volunteering for the youth group. So youth, I'm comfortable.

Come on up. Fill these tables. You don't have to sit on the couches.

All right, I tried. Oh, I've got a couple coming. There we go.

I'm not scared of the youth. Maybe. The last time I gave my a faith story or some kind of testimonial, I had an Italian translator.

So Anthony, if you could come up and translate for the Italian speakers in the room, that'd be great. As Anne-Marie said, my name is James Miles. I used to be known as Tina's husband.

Now you may know me as Alex's dad. Like she said, we've been coming to the church for 20 years. We had been visiting various churches in the area.

And when Alex was six months old, we came to faith, dropped him off in the nursery. The next week, we came back, and Tina was dropping him off in the nursery again. And Ruthanne Gigac said, oh, I know Alex.

We're best buds. And Tina's like, yeah, we're staying. Because every other church we had been to, we didn't know the nursery workers.

There were too many kids. They didn't know the kids. It was just kind of like a black hole.

You dropped your kids off in. And we were really appreciated coming to faith for that. And we also, if anyone remembers the ABFs, they were just starting an ABF for the young adults.

And the Sotolas were part of that, and the Trajillos, if you remember them. It was a great group of people around the same age with kids as we were. And it just really helped cement us to the church.

And we've been here for 20 years. And it'd be hard-pressed to get us to go anywhere else. So again, like Ann Marie said, we've raised four boys.

David is our youngest. He was born in 2011. Marcus is the next.

He's the middle child. And he was born in 2009. In our family, we have about seven O-Niners, as we call them, across all the cousins.

So he's one of a bunch in that age bracket. Alex, as many of you know, he was born in 2006. He's an 06.

And then Will was born in 2003. Currently, I work in security. I don't pack, but I know who does.

So if we have some sort of security threat, I'm there to help out. I can point them to Jonathan Baker. I also volunteer in the nursery so I can get my baby-holding fix, apparently.

At least that's what my wife tells me. I have volunteered in youth group as a youth group small group leader. I played drums in the praise team for quite a few years.

And I drove the Big Blue Bus, if anyone remembers the Big Blue Bus. After Bill Rydell left, I was the only one with a license. So I got to go on all the trips.

It was lots of fun. I was sad when Joey sold it, but I understood why. I was raised in the church.

I've been in the church since birth. I don't ever remember not being in the church. Both my grandparents were involved in the church.

There's just been multi-generations of churchgoers in my family. And the same for Tina's family as well. Her parents are in the church.

Her grandparents on both sides were in the church. And I see the blessings through that. They talk about the blessings that are passed down thousands of generations.

And I attribute a lot of the blessings in our lives, our children's lives, to just having that legacy of Christianity and faithful churchgoers and faithful Christ followers in our church. I believe I was four years old when I accepted Christ. My dad led me through the prayer for that.

I don't remember the circumstances as to why I made that decision. I just have that memory of making that decision and going through that. I think I have a Bible where my mom wrote that date down in it as well.

But I did get baptized when I was in high school. I don't remember the exact year, but I do remember that we had a cool baptismal behind the stage where you walk through, peek out the little window, and get dunked and then walk off. So that's my upbringing as far as being a Christian and making the faith my own.

One of the first churches we attended was just a small evangelical free country church in Pennsylvania. It was very small. My parents chose that church because it was in the school district that I was in, and they wanted us to be in a church and a school district and a youth group that was in the school district so we could have friends at school that were in the church.

The problem was it was small enough that my siblings, I have four siblings, we were the youth group. We had two other kids my age that were in the youth group, but they didn't lead Christian lives, and at school they weren't very friendly either. It was kind of a safe base at church, but at school really didn't want to have anything to do with us or me.

And so I was kind of drifting away from the church. This was during my junior high and into freshman year of high school. My sister and I were in marching band, and we would use those Saturday night competitions or football games to be like, oh, we stayed out too late.

We don't want to go. We're too tired. We want to go to church.

And we were just coming up with excuses to not go, and our parents were concerned about that. So they started researching other churches and found a church that was about 40 minutes away. It was outside of our school district, but it had a youth group of about 40 to 60 kids.

And we went to that and visited. My mom and I actually went and visited and went to the youth group and really enjoyed that being with a lot of kids my own age being involved in an active youth group. And fun fact, there were more kids from my school district in that youth group that was 40 minutes away, and my school district represented a majority of the kids that were in that youth group.

So the idea of like, hey, let's go to a church in the school district didn't really hold a lot of water. But the youth pastor there, he kind of joined at the same time that we joined. And he was hip, played basketball.

I mean, he did all the things that drew me to the youth group and kept me involved at the church. After graduating from high school, or I guess during high school, had to decide where I wanted to go to college. And I looked at a bunch of different places.

I was interested in computer science. And I remember coming to the decision that I really, my goal, one of my goals was to grow up, get married, raise a family. And I knew that I wanted to have a believing Christian wife.

And I kind of did the math and thought, well, if I go to a Christian university, the likelihood of me finding a good Christian woman is a lot higher than if I go to a secular university or a public university. I knew they were there, but I also knew that there were a lot of distractions that would be at a public university or a non-Christian one. So I decided to look at Christian universities primarily.

I went and looked at Wheaton. I couldn't do that because my dad went to Wheaton, my mom went to Wheaton, my sister went to Wheaton, my brother went to Wheaton. So I'm like, I'm going to go somewhere else.

So I decided on Taylor because Wheaton is the Taylor of Illinois. And so I came to Taylor. I liked Taylor because it was a lot more country than Wheaton as well.

Wheaton is just kind of stuck in the middle of the city. And Taylor is just, used to be wide open. Now they've put buildings in every green space that's there.

But really enjoyed kind of the wide open space. And it was probably good for me too because it was in the middle of nowhere and I couldn't go anywhere because I didn't have a car. So I just kind of had to embrace the community at Taylor.

Tina did go to Taylor as well. We did not meet at Taylor. I met a lot of Christian women at Taylor.

Most of them probably wanted to have nothing to do with me. And that's probably why Tina and I didn't meet at Taylor. If you're familiar with Taylor, and I think, I mean, I know there's some Taylorites here and Anthony's heading this fall.

But one of the statements that we had, and I think still have, is that guys in Wengates fuck girls in Olsen and marry the girls in English. And I embraced that. So any of the dates I did was girls from Olsen.

I was friends with girls from English, but I did end up marrying an English girl. Tina was in English while she was there. We met post-graduation.

It was three or four years after graduating. I was working in the area. I was living in Upland.

She was working at Madison Grant High School. And she was living in Anderson. And the way we got connected was my roommate and another friend of ours, he was married to a friend of Tina's.

And they had a New Year's Eve party where my roommate and his fiance and our friend and his wife were at this party. They invited Tina, and then I went to the party as well. This was actually, we were partying like it was 1999.

It was Y2K, New Year's Eve. And amazingly, nothing shut, I mean, you guys all know, nothing shut down that day. But both Tina and I had the thought in our mind that, hey, we are not getting set.

This is not a setup for us. This is not like, just because we're the only non-couple there, we're not going to get hooked up in that arrangement. But one of the other things that my roommate and this friend of ours, we would meet together every Monday night.

And one of us, one of the three of us, would make a pizza to share. We all had our kind of own style of pizza that we would make. And then we would watch professional wrestling.

And so we would get together every Monday night and do that. And Tina, at some point, decided that she felt bad for our friend's wife, because she was stuck in this house with three guys watching professional wrestling. So she started coming over and hanging out with his wife in the background.

But she would eat the pizza, and we'd all hang out and interact. And there was one day when, one week when my roommate and this other guy were, and his wife, they were doing something else. And we weren't going to meet for professional wrestling.

So being a techie, I did all my techie stuff and figured out what her email address was, and just emailed her on Sunday and said, hey, just because they're not here doesn't mean we can't get together and watch wrestling. We didn't. She's like, oh, I already have other plans.

And that was fine. But it kind of started the relationship. And we started chatting and emailing and talking a lot more.

And so youth, you can meet your spouse over professional wrestling. So we started dating in July of 2000. And we got engaged October of 2000 and got married June of 2001.

So we didn't figure that we, I mean, we were both, I was 25. She was 27. We didn't need to spend a whole lot of time.

She'll tell you that I scared living daylights out of her one day because we had gone out to do something. I don't remember what it was. And as we were coming back, I told her, look, the next person I date, I'm going to marry.

So if you don't think that this is going to be going anywhere, you let me know. And if I don't think it's going anywhere, I'll let you know. I don't want this to be a dragging on thing where we just stay together because we're comfortable.

And she's like, OK, so we're not dating, right? I'm like, no, it's fine. But we were, and we did. I mean, if I'm paying for stuff, it's dates, right? She was happy to let me pay.

So we got married June of 2001. And we had all of the same kind of ups and downs that a lot of young married couples have. I was working at, when we got married, I was working at Sprint, if anybody remembers Sprint.

This was Sprint when it was a telco. That means they had landlines that they ran into people's houses. So I worked for them in a business department selling big telephone systems to hospitals and large corporations.

And it was also in the dot-com bubble. So the companies were just throwing money at employees. And so I was making a really good income.

Tina was making a really good income. We had a six-figure family income together in 2001. And then I lost my job at Sprint because of the Y2K dot-com bubble burst and the recession that came there, which was fine.

I kind of hated that job anyway. And I ended up going. And my salary was cut in half, maybe 2 thirds, and went to work for a really small company as their IT director.

Then we got pregnant with Will and decided that Tina was going to stay home because we valued that more than we valued eating or buying clothes or whatever. And so we went from six figures down to about $35,000 a year. So it was a drastic, huge change in salary.

And that's when I really started to recognize and see God's provision in my life and how he, especially financially but in other areas, how he would provide in my life The first kind of real memory I have of that is when I was in college, my senior year, fall of my senior year, 1997, I went to the Los Angeles Film Studies Program, which was a program that Taylor and the Christian College Coalition put together, sent about 25 students to LA to work, to learn about film, how to create films and direct films and all that kind of stuff, go through a film program. But also there was an internship where 20 hours a week we would go work for a studio or some group connected to film. And I went to work for Jerry Bruckheimer Films.

And so they were working on Armageddon and Enemy at the State at the time when I went to work for them. And so part of that program was we lived in apartments. We had to pay for our own food.

And they would give us a stipend because we paid tuition to go. But they would give us kind of a stipend every week to help pay for gas and food and that kind of stuff. And I just remember I would do my devotions every morning.

And towards the end of the program, my bank account was getting pretty small. And I just felt God saying, hey, whatever money you have left, I want you to donate it to this thing. And I was like, OK.

I knew in two weeks I was going to have to drive home from LA, which was going to be a 24-hour trip. I needed gas to be able to do that. I needed to be able to buy food.

And this was the bucket of money that I had left. But I was obedient. And I donated the money to where he directed me to.

And that stipend was supposed to end that Friday. So I wasn't getting anything else. I wasn't planning on anything else.

And when we got together for our final kind of get-together to go through the debriefs and everything for the program, the program director said, hey, this has never happened before. But for some reason, we have one more week's worth of stipend left. And so each of you will get one more batch of money, whatever it was.

And that was enough to be able to pay for my trip home to get me back to where I needed to be and to pay for anything. And so that's just kind of a vivid memory of God providing. A second one was when we were married, we had Will.

And we were living. We had bought a house. We were living in a house, had the house pavement and all that kind of stuff.

And we were coming down to the last dollars. And I was like, we need to pay for food and diapers and all that kind of stuff. And I just suddenly got this check from the Indiana Department of Revenue in the mail.

They sent me $800. Apparently, when I had done my taxes earlier that year, I thought I owed $400. But I actually was supposed to get a refund of $400.

So I sent them $400, and they sent me $800 back. But the timing was perfect, because they sent me the $800 right when I needed it. So again, God can use the Internal Revenue Service or the Department of Revenue to help.

So that's areas that I have seen God provide. I've had several jobs where I have chosen to switch jobs. I've also, like with Sprint, was let go.

I saw the writing on the wall. That one wasn't very unexpected. But in 2018, I was working for Charles Schwab, and I was kind of moving up.

I was on track to become a manager. And I unexpectedly left Schwab. And God's provision there was that a few months prior, I had been going to networking events.

And I just happened to go to this brew pub in Indianapolis for a networking event around one of the tools that we used. And there was this guy sitting there. He's just like, yeah, I don't normally come to these things.

I was like, yeah, I don't come to them either. He's like, but I'm really, I'm looking for a senior business intelligence analyst for this specific thing at IU School of Medicine. And so fast forward two months, three months, I'm no longer working at Charles Schwab.

And I was like, well, let me see if this guy still needs this person. He probably has gotten an employee by now. And so I gave him a call, and I was like, hey, are you still looking for this position? He's like, yeah.

I'm like, can I send you my resume? He's like, yeah. So I sent him my resume, and it was just like, I mean, I had to go through all, it took a month to get the job because that's how higher education rolls. But yeah, it was just kind of that perfect timing again where I see God's provision within my life.

We lived, this is almost a non sequitur, but again, it's provisioning and how I see God working in my life. We owned a property. We lived in, when we moved down and started coming to faith, we bought a house on Smokey Row Road that backed up to 31.

If you drive by there now, it doesn't look like a house. Actually, Ann Marie's office, the current, is sitting right on top of where my septic tank was. Fun fact.

So we owned this house for quite a few years, and we knew that a developer was gonna come in and buy it at some point. And at that some point, Northtown, I think, or Northside developer came through and bought that whole, everything from the moment all the way to 31 so that they could put a lot of mixed use in there. And so we sold that, and I had money from that sale that I wanted to do something with.

We had moved out of that house by then, so I no longer got the tax credit for living there. They're like, eh, no, this is an investment property. You need to owe a lot of money for this.

And so I was looking for things to do, and I came across this idea of doing a residential assisted living. It's a small care home, group home. You build a house, put 10, 12 residents in the house, have a small staff, make sure that your ratio is really high number of staff to the number of residents.

And our seniors thrive, especially with memory care. They thrive much better in a small unit rather than being stuffed away in a lockdown unit in a wing of some really large assisted living facility. And that resonated with me because of a couple reasons.

One, I grew up, when I was nine years old, our family moved into the farmhouse that my dad grew up in, and we took care of my uncle who had Down syndrome. And he lived at a kind of three-year-old level. He was nonverbal.

He could do anything that you ask him to do within reason. He couldn't drive a car or anything, but he could get dressed, he could eat, he could go to the bathroom. If we told him, hey, the house is on fire, get out, he'd get out.

But if we weren't there and the house was on fire, he wouldn't know to get out. So really had no sense of self-preservation. So we always had to be there.

Someone always had to be there. And a lot of our decisions all revolved around what are we gonna do with Uncle Robert? Can we go on vacation? Can we take him with us? Do we have to find a babysitter, adult sitter, for him? And so I can appreciate what families are going through when they have a parent that can no longer take care of themselves. I don't have that kind of previous relationship, like he never was an adult that I could have a relationship with, so I don't have that necessarily.

But I appreciate having to have an adult that we have to take care of. My grandmother died with Alzheimer's, so I'm familiar with that. And then we had a friend whose dad had Parkinson's and they put him in a brand new facility in Carmel.

And then after a few different events happened, they got a call saying, hey, your dad's at the mental hospital downtown. You have a week to find a new place for him. Because they just couldn't handle, couldn't take care of him in the facility that they were in, even though it was the nicest in town, they just weren't trained well enough to do that.

So that kind of hit at the same time is that I had this kind of windfall of cash, so I looked into building a memory care home and started doing that. Bought a great property on 106th Street. It's on a main road, not a lot of neighbors.

Right next door, it's on the golf course. Figured it'd be a great place to put a home, a group home where it wouldn't be too impactful to a lot of people. Wasn't in the center of a neighborhood, even though legally that's allowed due to the Fair Housing Act.

Got all, started building. Got the building half built and the neighbor right next door sued. Sued to have the project stopped.

They won that injunction, so we had to stop the project. So fortunately, I had enough foresight to get the roof and everything on it. So it was dried in and protected from the elements, but it was sitting there not being worked on as the wheels of justice slowly turned.

That was in 2023. I am still in the middle of that lawsuit. We went to the local, we went to the appeals court, we went to the state supreme court.

We won at the state supreme court. We got the injunction overturned, but the state supreme court sent it back down to let the local judge fix his mistake. He chose not to, so now we're back at the appeals court and we're just waiting for the appeals court to rule in our favor.

So at some point during that, I think it even happened before the lawsuit, but at some point I was just kind of like trying to figure out what am I supposed to be doing. I felt kind of unsettled in what I was doing and I just remember sitting in the front of the sanctuary. I don't remember what point it was in the service.

I think it was kind of during worship or between worship and the sermon and I just kind of remember asking, God, what should I, what am I supposed to be doing? And in the most, it wasn't audible, but in the most audible way that I think I've ever heard God speak, I heard him say, just keep doing what you're doing. So I am faithfully still doing what I'm doing even though I'm just waiting on the justice, justice to be served and just trusting that God is going to do.

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